I’ve been following 13.0 starting around the same time last year. It was my coming back to FreeBSD after few years break. I instantly felt at home with it and I also wanted to use all the things “my way”. I customized /etc/make.confand /etc/src.conf, I switched to git repositories whenever they were available etc. All the fun stuff. FreeBSD behaved on my NUC rock solid all the time – I did bring some rain onto myself (you can’t avoid it when you mess around with bleeding edge), but never to a degree that wouldn’t be recoverable (thank goodness for bectl) this way or another. At some point this year I started preparing for this release and was going more and more towards defaults and eventually I switched back to freebsd-update and portsnap. Being able to do these things without a hitch is a testament of how good of operating system FreeBSD is. Now go try it out!